Charcoal Grill

For George Stephen, there was no joy in grilling. Every time he fired up his open-top backyard brazier pit, de rigueur in 1951, he "was smoking up the neighborhood and burning up half of what I cooked." A welder at the Weber Brothers Metal Works, Stephen built a solution by adapting materials typically used to make steel buoys for Chicago's harbor. A year later, the Weber kettle was born.